Canadian politicians don’t attract much notice this side of the border, but recently I’ve been heeding the words of Charlie Angus. A member of Canada’s Parliament for the New Democratic Party, Angus is a longtime punk rocker and activist with ties to the Catholic Worker movement; he’s also a sharp critic of the growing power of Big Tech. In late November, Angus attended a hearing in British Parliament in which representatives from nine countries took turns interrogating a Facebook vice president about the company’s proliferating scandals (an empty chair sat before a Mark Zuckerberg nameplate, marking the chief executive’s absence).
For Angus, fake news and data-based manipulation — exemplified by the shadowy work of Cambridge Analytica, whose voter-profiling scheme is often cited as an important factor in Donald Trump’s 2016 victory — were mere symptoms of a larger malady. “The problem is Facebook,” he declared. “The problem is the unprecedented economic control of every form of social discourse and communication.” It was one of Angus’s colleagues, the Canadian member of Parliament Bob Zimmer, who may be the one who gave the problem a name: “Surveillance capitalism,” he said, with its vast concentrations of data and influence over human life, required new laws and new forms of regulation.
